Hello!

It’s always nice to communicate with partners. Different mentalities, values and even accents help me have a deeper understanding of the people living around the world. After all, the building of partner links, it’s all about the right comminication. This time I interviewed Viacheslav Kravchuk, CEO of Atwix, to share some thoughts on his company, current projects and future plans and, of course, the partnership with aheadWorks.

Q: Hi Viacheslav! Thanks for taking the time to talk with me and our readers. First, would you share with us a bit about your company?

A: Atwix is a Magento Silver Solution Partner with a highly skilled team of professionals. One of the highest priorities at Atwix is to constantly develop qualification and skills of our employees, which is being confirmed by the certifications we pass like Magento Plus Developers Certification, Zend PHP 5.3 Certified Engineer Exam, Certified Scrum Master Course and many others. Primary development office of our company is based in Khmelnitsky, Ukraine.

Q: How and why you became involved with aheadWorks partnership program?

A: We’ve met aheadWorks at various Magento conferences we were attending, like Magento Imagine in USA and Meet Magento across different countries. Seeing that aheadWorks shares many core values of our company helped us to establish and develop a really great mutual relationship.

Q: What are the particularities of doing business with aheadWorks?

A: We really like the terms of Development Partners program. aheadWorks is doing a nice job of sharing the projects for custom development with partners and this is truly profitable deal for both sides.

Q: Thanks! However, besides receiving leads, you’re intensively using our products as well. Just curious: what’s the most powerful aheadWorks extension for you and why?

A: We’ve found the Advanced Search extension to be very helpful, our customers enjoy how it improves search performance in their stores.

Q: What’s your biggest business wish for your company? Where do you see your company in five years?

A: At Atwix we are excited about how quick we grow both in terms of qualification and number of developers. We aim to keep it up that way and excite Magento Community with new implementations and products we release. Stay tuned!

Q: Any last words you might like to share with our readers?

A: Atwix is sponsoring Magento Imagine 2013 Conference and we are pleased to invite everyone who is going to attend this gorgeous event (and everyone dealing with Magento should do it!) to stop by our booth and meet us, we will be glad to see you!

Q: Thanks again, Viacheslav! We’ll definitely look forward to meet you at Imagine. So see you in Vegas!

P.S. If you would like to become a partner or tell your story, please feel free to contact me at koteshov@aheadworks.com

Hi there!

Here’s the first of “Magento Connect Statistics” reports in 2013. Let’s compare the results through the perspective of one year period: 2012 vs. 2013. I chose January as the month under report and the most popular categories as the criteria for growth.

The overall growth is approximately 170 extensions a year/14 extensions a month, except for the Category’s page – as you can see, the increase is 394/33 respectively.

The new extensions ratio per month is quite big, so it is fair to say that merchants are provided with a considerable number of tools to make their business grow and progress.

Officially announced on January 29, 2013, the partnership between aheadWorks and Inchoo aims at taking two companies to even higher level of cooperation.

Artyom Rabzonov, aheadWorks CEO, commented on the partnership, “I’m delighted to announce that Inchoo has become aheadWorks very first official partner from Croatia. With Inchoo as a partner, we will be able to serve the Magento market even better than we were able to previously, with the benefit of Inchoo’s special knowledge and experience.”

Famous for its high-quality services and popular blog, Inchoo is an accredited Magento Silver Partner, employing twelve developers officially certified by Magento. For instance, this number is among the highest in the world.

Aron Stanic, Sales Manager, Inchoo also clarified the reasons Inchoo had in mind before officially joining the partnership program, “We’ve already been a “silent” partner of aheadWorks for quite some time now. Being a Magento Silver Solution Partner, we’ve come across many situations where our clients used some of aheadWorks extensions, if nothing else, the blog was certainly there .

During our work on various projects we’ve gotten to know the extensions offered by our Belarusian friends quite well, and we see this partnership as an opportunity, in addition to official certification, to get even more immersed in this vibrant network of great companies that were built around Magento, and perhaps even visit Minsk soon enough. We hope to see some of you at Imagine conference and we wish aheadWorks many more years of extending Magento!”

Without any doubt, this strategic partnership will enforce both companies position in the Magento world and will see the two companies coming together to take action on strengthening and developing Magento as the leading eCommerce platform.

So yes, we’re all safe and sound, no global devastation has occurred so far (let’s cross fingers) and the year 2012 became the part of history. It is a good time to draw some conclusions as long as the year 2012 was full of events, impressions and (what I like the most) – rich in meetings/conferences/chats/networking with good and talented people around the globe.

As a person who’s mainly responsible for establishing partner links around aheadWorks, I’ll focus on the partnership program and its large circle of partners.

In total, 36 partners from 18 countries helped us build the partners network in 2012. This way, we covered all the inhabited continents except for Africa.

Our partners are enrolled in Magento Industry and Solution Programs including 8 Gold, 4 Silver and 7 Bronze partners.

If we talk about the size, we’ve got small (up to 5), medium (10-15) and large (over 45 people) companies in our list of partners.

The services provided by our partners include programming, performance optimization, customization, hosting set-up, design and others.

The partnership program itself ran through several changes in 2012 as we changed its title, tiers and partnership levels.

For instance, in addition to several benefits such as discounts on aheadWorks products (up to 45% on the full range of products), dedicated support and consulting (see the full list on the partnership program page), we introduced a new one in December: now all our partners are provided with leads for the custom development services.

This latest offer is highly popular as seven new partners joined the program in December alone and I expect this number to keep on growing in 2013.

And finally, on behalf of the whole aheadWorks team, I’d like to thank our partners for being with us all through the year and we wish them to have even bigger ball in 2013. From our side, we’ll do our best to be good and trusted partners to you.

Hello!

Sometimes a single letter or its place in a word changes the whole meaning of a notion. I’m 100 percent sure it happened to you at least once: you type Magento in Google search and you get…the pictures of a strange creature in an odd-looking helmet and special costume. Yes, I mean Magneto, the central villain of the X-Men comics.

So this was my misprint of the day. Don’t know why but I decided to know more about this fictional character. To my surprise, I found out that Magneto was ranked number 1 by IGN’s Top 100 Comic Book Villains list! Sounds familiar, huh? Yes, the same thing is about Magento who’s being the well-recognized leader (not villain, sure) in the world of e-commerce.

So this time I will spell it correctly. Please, welcome Magne..oops! Magento Connect statistics for your pleasure.

What ho fellow Magento ladies and gentlemen!

Earlier this day I thought that this piece of the unstoppable story about statistics would be done in Jeeves & Wooster style. And I did it. For those who are unfamiliar with the name, well, it is a series of books by P.G Wodehouse (who, incidentally, had a birthday in October) about an English gentleman and his valet in the entourage of 1920’s Great Britain. Not quite sure if this brilliant writer knew anything about Magento or e-commerce, but anyway, let’s be indulgent to classics

Bertie Wooster: Jeeves, I have to make one thing crystal clear.
Jeeves: Yes, sir?
Bertie Wooster: I am not one of those fellows who become absolute slaves to Magento extensions.
Jeeves: [as if shocked] No, sir.
Bertie Wooster: Just as long as we understand each other. In case you thought so. With all these monthly reports, it’s easy to make a wrong decision.
Jeeves: Not at all, sir.
Bertie Wooster: Very good, Jeeves! So what’s the news on Magento Connect?
Jeeves: It turns like the extensions for Category& Product Page Enhancements are the winner in October, sir.
Bertie Wooster: Ha! I knew it right from the very start! You’d better read the rest, Jeeves.
Jeeves: Very good, sir [clears throat]: Category& Product Page Enhancements (+36), Shipping & Fulfillment (+29), Catalog (+18) and Widgets (+16), sir.
Bertie Wooster: Hmm, widgets… Have you ever seen any extensions for widgets in this list, Jeeves?
Jeeves: I have not had that pleasure, sir.
Bertie Wooster: We should have one of these.
Jeeves: I shall do as you recommend, sir.

Just like Bertie Wooster, here at aheadWorks we also recommend you to empower your Magento store with any extensions you might find useful, because Black Friday and multiple hordes of customers are coming this month!

Hello and welcome to the Magento statistics world!

Sometimes I get the blues, especially, when I look at myself sitting in an office in the heart of autumn. It usually happens in the early morning when the rain keeps on falling and falling and the only warm thing around is the coffee mug in my hands. No, it is a not a funny feeling, this famous autumn sadness.

But on the bright side, things look great: more and more extensions on Magento Connect are ready to serve your needs. Just reach your arms and gear yourself up with the latest weapons to fight your way through the lack of clients and competition.

So the leaders for September are:

• Images & Media (+44)
• UI Performance & Ajax (+39)
• Category & Product Page Enhancements (+34)
• Checkout (+18)

Thanks for your time and goodbye!